Modern research and technology have provided society with a wide variety of electronic devices. It is appreciated that some of these modern electronic devices are very powerful and useful to their users. For example, some of the electronic devices which fall into this category include: computers which occupy large office space down to computers which are held in one's hand, satellites which orbit around earth relaying a multitude of communication signals, global positioning system (GPS) devices capable of determining the specific locations of their users on the earth, cellular phones which enable their users to communicate wirelessly with other people, to name a few. Additionally, it should be appreciated that some modern electronic devices also provide entertainment to their users. For instance, some of the electronic devices which fall into this category include: portable and fixed radio receivers which provide their users music along with a wide array of different audio programming, video game consoles which challenge their users with varying situations within different virtual realities, portable and fixed compact disc (CD) players which provide music to their users, and portable and fixed televisions which provide a wide variety of visual and audio programming to their users.
It is appreciated that television programming content is distributed to televisions of the general public in a wide variety of ways. For example, consumers of the general public are able to receive television programming content on their televisions within their households and/or businesses via coaxial cables, personal satellite dishes (large or small), antennas, broadband Internet, and the like. Furthermore, television programming content may be broadcast to the general public in different formats. For example, providers of television programming content typically broadcast their content to the general public in an interlaced format. Specifically, within the interlaced format, the broadcasters do not transmit all of the data associated with each frame (also referred to as a field) of the television video content. Instead, the broadcaster may transmit the even horizontal lines of a first frame of the video content while in the next frame it will transmit the odd horizontal lines. In this manner, broadcasters are taking advantage of the human eye which is unable to detect the missing alternating horizontal lines of the successive frames of video. Additionally, the broadcasters are conserving their transmission bandwidth by only transmitting half of the data of each video frame.
However, there are disadvantages associated with broadcasters transmitting their television programming content in the interlaced format. For example, digital televisions and high definition televisions (HDTV) are not initially designed to receive and handle television programming content in the interlaced format. Instead, digital televisions and high definition televisions are intentionally designed and fabricated to receive television programming content in a format referred to as a progressive format. As opposed to the interlaced format, the progressive format includes all of the picture data of each video frame within the video bitstream. In this manner, digital televisions and high definition televisions are able to provide their viewers a picture quality having a higher resolution than the conventional interlaced format televisions.
One solution to the above disadvantage is to modify digital televisions and high definition televisions such that they are able to handle television content received in the interlaced format. For example, one of the ways to enable digital televisions and high definition televisions to handle interlaced television content is to enable their hardware to double the pixel information of every received line of each frame and utilize that information to fill in the missing horizontal lines of that frame. However, there are disadvantages associated with this solution. One of the main disadvantages is that the resultant picture quality has poor resolution.
Another solution to the above disadvantage is to try to determine what the original content was of the missing horizontal lines of each frame of the interlaced television content. However, there are also disadvantages associated with this solution. One of the main disadvantages is that implementation of this type of solution typically can be complicated thereby increasing the overall production costs of the digital television or high definition television.